NO BRIEF INTRODUCTION can take account of
centuries of debate and disagreement concerning Hamlet, except perhaps
to register the belief that the endless commentary – inspired, or dull; shrewd,
or absurd – testifies to the fact that this is a play which history, as well as
its own extraordinary merit, has given a special place apart, with such works as
the Commedia and Faust. Certainly no play before Hamlet
could have accommodated so much and so diverse metaphysical and
psychological speculation. How Shakespeare came to write it is, of course, a
mystery on which it is useless to speculate; but although it is formally related
to a popular set of dramatic conventions (which we know from many other
surviving examples), Hamlet clearly works on a different level from any
other play of its kind, and indeed from any preceding play of Shakespeare’s.
Somehow, as Granville-Barker suggested, he himself became a different man in
those early years at the Globe; he found his daimon. Hamlet,
in addition to all its other titles to veneration and notoriety, was the first
great tragedy Europe had produced for two thousand years.
T. S. Eliot’s
well-known judgment that Hamlet is “certainly an artistic failure”
stems, as much other criticism does, from a not unreasonable conviction that in
expanding a simpler Revenge play Shakespeare produced something which is
inexplicably confused as drama, something distorted by the pressure of a
personal emotion which did not succeed in finding an objective equivalent in so
simple and archaic a form. Thus the action of the play gives rise to many
problems, for reader and producer alike; and there is – especially in the part
of Hamlet himself – an evident charge of passion, a wild contrariety between his
language and its occasions, which blur the outline of the work, and have
encouraged generations of critics since Coleridge to use it only as a glass in
which to see a flatteringly distorted image of themselves.
Coleridge’s
“I have a smack of Hamlet” may, however, be a tribute to the world’s remaking of
Everyman in Hamlet’s image, and it is something we are all, in a time of
obligatory and schematic introspection, entitled in some degree to feel. We are
no longer satisfied with simple accounts of motive, and we are ready enough to
find metaphysics to explain why our response to any such stimulus as “duty”
seems inhibited beyond anything the immediate crude circumstances appear to
justify. In the perplexed figure of Hamlet, just because of our sense that his
mind lacks definite boundaries, we find ourselves. And no amount of explanation
in terms of Elizabethan conventions or Renaissance psychology, useful and
interesting as such inquiries have been in deepening the complexities they
sought to remove, can abolish our natural and historic right to do so. (By the
same token, the conjectures of such psychologists as Ernest Jones have a
relevance scholarship should not deny.) It may be that Hamlet’s “buffoonery” is
“the buffoonery of an emotion which Shakespeare cannot express in art” (save
that he must in some sense have expressed it if we know of its existence); it
may be that on a possible definition of art such expression is either limited or
excessive. Certainly Hamlet is problematic, full of doubt concretely as
well as discursively projected, unsparing of words, even to the point of
habitually using two for one, as it uses two characters and two themes for one.
It is of no clear shape, oblique, dubitant, duplicate. What Harry Levin has said
of Hamlet himself applies equally to the play as a whole: “it is not so much a
perplexing personality as … a state of perplexity into which we enter.” But its
affective power, its “negative capability” or failure to assert any of the
possible ethical or metaphysical positions it creates, while at the same time
generating its unique atmosphere of anxiety and its genuine hints of charity,
made it a model for the new mind of Europe.
he history of the text of Hamlet is very complex. Techniques of
scholarly inquiry grow more subtle, but as yet they have achieved no certainty
on some issues crucial to the task of editing Hamlet. The play was
entered in the Stationers’ Register in 1602, presumably in an attempt to block
unauthorized publication; but the First Quarto of 1603 was a piracy, perhaps the
work of the actor who played Marcellus and Lucianus, with the part of Voltemand
at hand. It is a brief, mutilated text, based on Shakespeare’s Hamlet
at some stage in its history, but evidently also reflecting material not in
the later authorized texts. Polonius is called Corambis, the “To be or not to
be” soliloquy is placed earlier in the play, and there are other difference. The
compilers supplied the defects of their memories from other plays and notably
from recollections of an old Hamlet; this play, probably by Kyd, is
mentioned with some contempt by Nashe as early as 1589, and seems to have been
well known in the ’nineties. The lost Ur- Hamlet, as it is called, is also
reflected in a German play called Der bestrafte Brudermord (Fratricide
Punished), existing in a text of 1710 and possibly the corrupt descendant
of a Hamlet performed by English actors on a German tour in the early
seventeenth century. Here Polonius is called Corambus. Attempts to reconstruct
the Ur- Hamlet have to rely largely on Q1 and the German play. In any
case, Q1 has no textual authority, although, for reasons explained in the “Note
on the Text” below, editors cannot ignore it.
The Second Quarto, dated
1604 in some copies and 1605 in others, was authorized, and claimed, correctly,
to be “enlarged to almost as much againe as it was.” It is a notoriously
ill-printed book, but has of course great authority. The First Folio text of
1623 differs from Q2 in hundreds of readings, and has about eighty-five lines
missing from Q2 to compensate for over two hundred that it lacks. An account of
the complex relationships between the three main texts, and of the principles of
the present recension, is given in the “Note on the Text.”
Q1, it will be
observed, is no longer regarded as representing an earlier Shakespearean version
of Hamlet. The old Hamlet, as Henslowe’s diary testifies, was
performed in June 1594, but probably belongs to the ’eighties; Nashe in the
Epistle to Greene’s Menaphon (1589) speaks satirically of “whole
Hamlets, I should say handfuls of tragical speeches.” We may think of it as the
archetype of Revenge plays, and as preceding The Spanish Tragedy
(whether or no Kyd wrote both), since so many recurring features of the
theatrical revenge plot belong to the original Hamlet story. It seems likely
that a vogue for Revenge plays grew up around 1599, when Marston’s Antonio’s
Revenge was played by a boys’ company; this would explain the decision of
Shakespeare’s company to revive Hamlet in a modernized form. In 1601
some very sophisticated additions were made to The Spanish
Tragedy.
Some scholars believe that Shakespeare rehandled Hamlet
more than once. The facts as we know them suggest, at any rate, that he
rewrote the old play in 1600. Gabriel Harvey’s observation that Shakespeare’s
play and The Rape of Lucrece “have it in them, to please the wiser
sort” was written in a copy of Speght’s Chaucer (1598), and in the same
context Harvey spoke of the Earl of Essex in the present tense. Essex was
executed in February 1601; and on the balance of evidence Harvey’s note appears
to indicate that Shakespeare’s play existed before that date. But the passage in
F1 (not in Q2) about the child actors and the War of the Theatres (II. Ii.
337-62) cannot have been written before the middle of 1601. The allusions to
“innovation” and “inhibition” in the same scene (332-33) have often been thought
to refer to the rebellion of Essex (February 8, 1601); innovation is a
word Shakespeare uses of political upheavals, and Shakespeare’s company, which
was commissioned to act Richard II as a curtain-raiser to the
insurrection, might in consequence have been “inhibited,” that is, officially
forbidden to play in the city for a time. But in fact it was not; and the words
are more likely to refer to a Privy Council order of 1600 limiting the number of
performances by the two major companies – a kind of “inhibition” – and to the
new popularity of the boys’ companies – taking innovation in the sense
of novelty, a word which the pirates of Q1 used to render
innovation. Probably Shakespeare wrote Hamlet after Julius
Caesar (1599) and finished it before February 1601, adding the reference to
the War of the Theatres late in that year.
When the French writer Belleforest used this story in his collection of Histoires Tragiques (1576) he apologized for its primitive ferocity and gave it, what it retained, the setting of a contemporary court. He kept the main features of the story as outlined above, but has some emphases different from Shakespeare. Thus in his story, as in Saxo’s but not as in Shakespeare’s, it is generally known that Claudius killed hamlet’s father; his defense is that he did so in order to save the left of the Queen. In Belleforest the Queen is clearly an adulteress. The young Hamlet (by no means thirty, as he is in Shakespeare’s last act) pretends madness in self-protection, a rationalization of the Clever Boy folk-theme that survived into Saxo and in a sense re-emerges in Shakespeare. Claudius tries to prove him sane, first by a trick involving the girl he loves (in Belleforest she is, in fact, his mistress) and then by planting a spy in Gertrude’s chamber. Hamlet avoids the first of these traps through a friend’s warning, and the second he escapes by pretending to be mad, rushing about the chamber, and discovering the spy, whom he kills. After this scene Gertrude is on Hamlet’s side. He then goes to England for a year, procures the death of his companions, and marries the English king’s daughter. On his return, still feigning madness, he kills Claudius after an exchange of swords, and burns down the banqueting-hall.
Belleforest must have been the principal source of the Ur-Hamlet, which would doubtless have added the Ghost, the dumb Show, and the fencing match. Whether it accepted the motivation of Belleforest’s plot, which Shakespeare clearly rejects, and which for the most part keeps Hamlet on the defensive against a powerful opponent, we cannot certainly know. V. K. Whitaker, in the most careful recent reconstruction, suggests that it had a secret murder, a doubtful ghost, and feigned madness used as a way of aggression, not defense. It perhaps made the girl in the story the daughter of the spy, and gave the spy an avenging son, so creating the Polonius family. Thus it established not only the Hamlet/Laertes contrasts, but a contrast between the real insanity of Ophelia and Hamlet’s antic disposition. The play within the play was probably not a means to revenge, as in The Spanish Tragedy, but a test of the Ghost’s veracity; but as yet it was probably only a dumb show, with not text. After the closet scene Gertrude was Hamlet’s accomplice. Polonius was called Corambis, as in Q1. The nunnery scene took place immediately after its planning, not, as in Q2 and F1, some time later, with consequent difficulties to the producer and the interpreter. <!--pagebreak-->There is no doubt that on a purely dramaturgical level the changes made by Shakespeare reduce plausibility. If the old play followed Belleforest in stressing Hamlet’s difficulty in getting at the King, Shakespeare was not much interested, and located the problems within the hero’s own personality. It may have had a much more plausible Horatio, who in Shakespeare’s play is a somewhat chameleontic figure – a stranger or an habitué of the court as the need arises. Its Ghost was doubtless a simple affair, raising none of the problems caused by Shakespeare’s equipping it with a Christian context and perhaps even inviting some theological controversy. In short, Shakespeare, not for the first or last time, shows less interest in mere probability than in thematic development of a subtler kind. Consequently this play – difficult enough in all conscience to comprehend, a mass of problems indeed – is made even less simple by the presence of certain inconsistencies and anomalies entailed by the drastic rehandling of the sources.
Although Hamlet says that “the story is extant, and writ in very choice Italian,” there is no known source of the Gonzago plot, though there are a few hints in Belleforest. Shakespeare seems even to have altered the details of King Hamlet’s murder in order to make the play-within-the-play fit, though this may have been done in the earlier play to allow for the introduction of a Ghost, and to make the murder a secret instead of common knowledge. As to minor sources, the handling of Hamlet’s mental condition owes something to Timothy Bright’s Treatise of Melancholy (1586), and there are some much-debated echoes of Montaigne, especially in the soliloquies on suicide. Florio’s translation of the Essays was published in 1603, but existed for some years before, under circumstances which do not make it improbable that Shakespeare could have read it, even supposing he had not read the original French (published in full in 1588).
Hamlet is a multiple play; Shakespeare not only alters the old plot but expands it at every opportunity. For implicit comment on Hamlet’s attitude to his task of revenge, we have the carefully-built-up Laertes; we see how he feels about his family, how he is cherished by the King who fears Hamlet, how he dares damnation and the loss of “both the worlds” for instant and savage revenge and is willing to use any amount of “policy” to make it possible. And if this is not enough, we have also Fortinbras, contrasted with Hamlet not only in I.ii, before the story is launched, but in IV.iv. where he becomes an “occasion” that expressly “informs” against Hamlet. We have Ophelia’s madness as a foil to Hamlet’s “antic disposition,” and the factitious grief of the player who “acts” without motive when Hamlet, with all the motive in the world – as he tells us – cannot act at all. Polonius dies, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern “go to it,” not so much because they are spies as to show that Hamlet can kill. The Mouse-trap becomes a great excuse for a long lecture on acting, the death of Ophelia for hundreds of melancholic lines on death. And these instances of the apparently leisurely, expansive construction of Hamlet could be multiplied. Everything conspires to make the play long: those wild changes of mood from antic to melancholic; those fierce renewals of passion as when he turns again on his already reeling mother in the closet scene; the game of feeding suspicions with evidence as when he helps Polonius to believe that love is the cause of his distemper, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to compile reports on his ambition; all these, and Hamlet’s own pale cast of thought, make of Hamlet a delaying play at least as surely as Hamlet himself is a delaying revenger.
The unusual obliquity of the opening is worth noting. Shakespeare normally opens with plot and thematic material of the highest importance, shrewdly and economically presented; Julius Caesar, the last tragedy before Hamlet, is a fine instance. In Hamlet all is different; one has almost to assume an audience that knew the story and was willing to be teased by indirection. To be sure, the opening scene is as economical in the creation of atmosphere as that of Macbeth. There is the challenge of Barnardo, who nervously steals the sentry’s words; the telling “I am sick at heart”; the cold and the fear. “Shakespeare,” says T. S. Eliot, “had worked for a long time in the theatre, and written a good many plays before reaching the point at which he could write those twenty-two lines.” Out of their varied rhythms, and the beautifully unexpected speech of Marcellus, “It faded on the crowing of the cock,” there arises, as Eliot says, “a kind of musical design.” But meanwhile the ghost – “this thing” – has appeared. (Horatio as sceptic raises questions as to its status which could have been avoided.) There has been speculation as to its purpose, but one thing seems sure: it has to do with the state of the nation – it “bodes some strange eruption to our state” – and with the armaments drive now in progress under the threat from Norway. That it genuinely has to do with the state of the nation – its spiritual rather than its merely political state – we shall learn; and to give us a “musical” sense that this is so, there is the unexpected speech about Christmas. But so far as plot goes, this might be the opening scene of a play about a Caesar-like Hamlet now dead but still posthumously interested in empire. Young Hamlet is not even mentioned until line 170 – after nearly nine minutes’ playing time. <!--pagebreak--> The second scene opens with a passage of formal pomp, dwelling on the late King and his successor, and moving on first to the question of the threat of war and then to the departure of Laertes. Only when the ambassadors leave does Hamlet enter the story or the dialogue. The effect is, of course, theatrical and calculated. We have had before us Hamlet’s two rivals, Fortinbras and Laertes; we have seen his enemy, the King, formidably in action; we have met the mature and rational Horatio; and then at last, twelve minutes after the start, the black Hamlet. He opens with an antic quibble, and his first sustained speech is a melancholy moralizing on the great gulf between being and seeming. Finally he rejects the proper consolation offered by the King, and – before he commences business as a revenger, be it noted – soliloquizes on his disgust with life in a corrupt world. Only then, in his examination of Horatio and his companions. Do we see the Hamlet of sharp practical intelligence and fine charity of manner; and then too, for the first time, we hear mention of specific “foul deeds” about to arise. We await with new interest his encounter with the Ghost; but seven minutes of mutual moral exhortation in the Polonius family intervene. Even as he waits on the battlements, Hamlet is given time to discourse thoughtfully on the dangers of scandal in public life; and Horatio, with his fear of the Ghost as potentially evil, delays the meeting yet again, until Hamlet follows, hears, swears instant revenge, and gives the first of those displays of manic behavior which prove him – lapsed in passion – to be punished with a sore distraction.
This, for all its violent action, is the mood of the play, a play in which an Osric can postpone the imminent catastrophe for over a hundred affected lines, in which even Hamlet’s soliloquies seem slightly misplaced; in which the characters busy themselves with rival theories about the nature of Hamlet’s unease. For Polonius it is disappointed love, for his mother “His father’s death and our o’erhasty marriage”; for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern it is thwarted ambition, and for Ophelia simple lunacy. Nor is this all the theorizing in the play. Hamlet himself theorizes constantly – about the Ghost, about passion, about action; about manners and acting and suicide and custom. If those long delays at the outset are intended to kindle the interest of the audience in this new Hamlet – how will he differ from the old? What kind of hero and revenger will he be? – they will find that there is no simple answer to their questions. Hamlet is not what they expected; they must join with the other characters in the great Hamlet activity of guessing, theorizing, waiting, testing. Above all, they are kept waiting and kept doubting. Shakespeare will no more than Hamlet sweep to his revenge with wings as swift as meditation or the thoughts of love. For both of them, it seems, the murder of the old Hamlet is simply a particular instance of a general evil. And in the delays which follow – delays which we, fascinated by the uniquely irregular rhythm of the play, might not note for ourselves if Hamlet did not draw our attention to them – we are always conscious that we are being offered not so much a man, but a play, or a world, that delays and doubts; suddenly inventing, for instance, the problem of whether the Ghost is to be believed, questioning not the difficulties of the particular act of murder but the questionable shape of all action.
